Lancashire's 'Little Voice' star Jane Horrocks tells of role in TV rock comedy

ACTRESS Jane Horrocks, last seen on screen impersonating stars like Judy Garland and Shirley Bassey in Little Voice, turns to another musical style for her latest role.

Jane, originally from Rawtenstall, stars in the television film Hunting Venus as a woman obsessed with a New Romantic band from the 1980s.

The film was written by her partner Nick Vivian and also stars Martin Clunes and Neil Morrissey from Men Behaving Badly.

Jane plays Cassandra, who ran the fan club of New Romantic one-hit wonders The Venus Hunters.

She and her lover Jacqui (Esther Coles) kidnap bass player Simon Delancey (Clunes) in an effort to force him to re-form the band for one final performance.

Simon had robbed the fan club of its funds 15 years earlier when the band split up, and Cassandra and Jacqui want him to make up for it.

Jane, 35, who is expecting her second child in a fortnight, revealed she asked Nick to base the character of Cassandra on her brothers.

She said: "My eldest brother has a very pedantic way of speaking, and I wanted someone who would over-use words and be quite pompous in their dialogue.

"My other brother is a typical Northern bloke and I wanted Cass to be quite bloke-ish too."

The film, directed by Martin Clunes, features guest appearances by some of the New Romantic era's biggest stars - including Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran, Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet, Phil Oakey, Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley from the Human League and Gary Numan. Jane said the filming of The Venus Hunters' single, Starburst, in front of so many famous faces was a highlight.

"Filming was really good fun," she said. "I loved the New Romantic era - that is the period of music that I'm most into."

"It was great seeing Neil and Martin and the others dressed up and performing Starburst. We were all dressed up in ridiculous costumes.

"Simon Le Bon and Gary Numan were fantastic and really game for a laugh. They realised more than anybody how ridiculous they used to look at the time!"

Although Jane was acting with musical legends, they were the ones who were daunted by the experience.

"It's amazing how nervous they were because acting is not their field so in that respect, we were streets ahead of them, even though they are icons in their own right," she said.

"We really looked up to them and by the end of the day, they were in awe of us."

Jane, a former pupil of Fearns High School, Bacup, was nominated for a Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Comedy for her role as LV in the film Little Voice, and she has just received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress. Although she has enjoyed success on stage, in the play on which Little Voice was based - The Rise and Fall of Little Voice - and in Cabaret, she said she had given up the theatre after being left demoralised by a production of the "cursed" Shakespeare play Macbeth in 1995, in which she played Lady Macbeth.

She said: "It emotionally highlights the bad things that you're going through in life because it's just so hard to play.

"I think the theatre can be very tricky and hard - certainly, if you've decided to have a family, it's difficult to juggle the two."

Jane - well known to TV viewers as Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous - also criticised the state of theatre in general.

She said when she started acting in the mid-eighties, theatres gave opportunities to more new writers than they do now.

"I don't have a great deal of respect for theatre at the moment either. The West End is full of revivals. They don't encourage writers as much as they used to," she said.

But she hinted that if might not be goodbye to the stage forever. If a new play came along that she liked, she would "consider" it, she said.

Hunting Venus will be shown on ITV on Wednesday March 31.

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